You have three meetings a week that can sometimes last two and a half hours in the middle of the night and no one on your team sees that as an issue?!

The key to making big timezone differences work is to make communication as asynchronous as possible and where that can't be done make it as humane as possible. Clearly these meetings can be scheduled in times where both sides should naturally be awake. I work from Iceland with people on the East and West Coast so about the same time difference and I'm mostly in meetings in the early evening although nothing so epicly long. Your colleagues could be doing the same. We also alternate so some are early morning for them and afternoon for me.

For people getting blocked it really depends on what it is but for the most part I do as you do and park what I'm working on and get on with something else. If it's something simple that can be fixed with a bit of back and forth I'd try pre-empting these issues (e.g. are you just being used as a really expensive form of live documentation).

Honestly it sounds like the team is treating you like a "second-class citizen." It seems 100% unreasonable for you to have to attend 3:30am meetings ever let alone twice a month. You need to be able to have a somewhat normal sleep-schedule in order to maintain a healthy lifestyle and to continue to be a productive member of the team and of society. Personally I think you need to re-set some expectations - you're just as much a part of the team as everyone else. Sure you may need to work 1-3 hours outside of "9-5" time to meet in the middle, but so do they. (Unless of course you really like the swing-shift, in which case you need make those hours very consistent and very public.)

My team had 2 remote people who were treated like that for a few months, but they quickly realized it wasn't fair or sustainable and pushed back. So our team-wide meetings got bumped to 9am, and we got good at making decisions that they cared about while they were online. Or we queued up things for them to respond to the following day. It's not as easy as being able to tap someone on the shoulder, but nothing is right now with everyone WFH. Everybody needs to grow up and treat each other with a bit more respect. (/rant but not really)

It sounds like you were in San Francisco prior to the remote work change and went back to Sydney once that happened? If not how did it work when everyone was in the office?

If only one member of a team is in a vastly different time zone I haven't seen it work myself unfortunately. Not that it's absolutely impossible just that you're always going to be the guy out of sync with the team due to the small amount of overlap to work with anyone else. No amount of async communication will ever fix that the majority of the time anyone wants to ask you a simple question they'll have to wait until tomorrow (which for simple questions means they'll just spend time to try to figure it out themselves instead of ask you) and vice versa. Where I've seen vastly different time zones be successful is when the group is more evenly distributed and it turns into rolling pockets of collaboration rather than a stark handoff at the fray of the working day for each party. It doesn't so much matter if a particular time zone has most of the people just that for most of your work day it's possible for you to interact live with a few others the team and vice versa.

If the above doesn't seem possible you'll either have to find the unicorn answer which is going to be very specific to what your team does (e.g. maybe is there a role which takes almost exactly 1 FTE that doesn't actually need to be in the team as much as produce deliverables for them or maybe by sheer rare chance your group is willing and actually functions well with a majority of communication being async), find a way to come to terms with a 3rd shift job, or find a new position that matches your needs better.

I'm US East Coast (effectively, though not formally, remote) and the company--while pretty distributed--tends to be centered on the East Coast timezone. We don't have a lot of people on the West Coast so we mostly schedule morning meetings when we need people in Europe to participate, where we do have a lot of people.

APAC? it's tough. They're on a lot of late night calls though we make do as we have to. (And again, tend to have fairly early AM meetings ET (or late afternoon/evening) if Asia needs to participate.) I'm not in engineering but my guess is that there's a lot less real-time collaboration than with engineering offices/remotes in the US and Europe. One standing meeting I'm in, we alternative between late in the (business) day and early in the (business) day ET.

Here's GitLab's guide on async: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/asynchro...

It's a challenge for suddenly-remote companies which aren't used to working this way, especially if all work communication isn't funneled through a tool that is designed for async workflows. The benefit of a remote organization which was designed as remote is people opt-in to those workflows.

Much has been said about transitioning from colocated to remote, but remote teams would struggle as well if suddenly forced into the office. It's worth recognizing that part of the challenge is the sudden shift in environment, regardless of origin and destination.

The super power you mention has elements of truth to it. Some people naturally prefer to work this way, while others prefer sync. It is tougher on those who prefer sync to suddenly need to work async.

I worked in a team where the maximum time difference between members varied from 12h (when everyone was near their primary residence) to 20h (when some people traveled). We were 100% remote and mostly async, but we had daily meetings and others like grooming, planning etc. I was lucky to be in the middle (Central Europe) so the daily was ~2PM for me, for some it was 9PM, for others 9AM. If you were in a time zone that made it inconvenient (like 3AM in Hawaii) you were not expected to join, just post your daily updates on team's Slack channel. Similar with other meetings, most went fine missing a member or two. Nobody expected you to reply outside of your core working hours and it was cool to create a PR at the end of the work day and wake up to see it reviewed first thing in the morning.

I can see your pain being alone in a distant time zone and honestly the only advice I could give would be to try and agree on time slots that work for both parties.